A blog about advanced Microsoft search products including FAST ESP, SharePoint Search Server, FAST Search for SharePoint, and the various flavors - FAST Search for Internet Servers (FSIS) and FAST Search for Internal Applications (FSIA). Learn how to implement search in SharePoint.. or standalone using FAST ESP.

Last month we asked in our survey what information you wanted to know more about - not just more on what's in the book, but topics that we didn't have room (and time!) to get into the book. Your answers are in:

It looks like FAST Search for SharePoint, Custom Pipelines, FAST Query Language, and Search UI design are all tied for the lead, with FSIS, CTS, Custom Indexing and Federated Search coming in 2nd place. There is clearly alot of pent up demand for technical information on search.

(The 'All Other Responses' is a little confusing and may be a remnant of the survey tool: there were only two 'other' responses: One 'spam' posting about SEO, and one about Custom Connectors).

We'll make an effort to start providing more information on these topics, as well as topics of interest to the search business owner who is tasked with making search run right!

Our first contest comes to a close in a week and we'll draw the name of the person who wins the autographed copy of out book. If you've not yet done so, complete the survey today for your chance at a free book!

In the very back of our book, we give the URLs for some useful enterprise search resources, including blogs and trade shows. These can be helpful in learning about enterprise search, and stay up-to-date on current trends and technologies. Search touches everything in the organization, and improving the enterprise search in the organization delivers real ROI.

But the real hiddem gems in the Resources appendix are the links to the source code snippets from the book at Wrox; and to two Microsoft sites where you can get free evaluation copies of the software as well as training and product materials.

The first site, www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch, is the landing page for Enterprise Search at Microsoft. The site contains links to marketing material on all of the various search products offered by Microsoft, including videos and product information.

It also contains a link to the second site we mention in the book: The Technet Enterprise Search landing page where you can browse developer training materials for SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search; download an evaluation copy of Search Server Express, the standalone search from Microsoft; and download a full 180 day evaluation copy of SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint. This last download, available as a Hyper-V virtual hard drive, comes fully populated with web sites, files, and 200 corporate user profiles for 200 (virtual) employees of the 'Contoso' corporation.

The download also comes with some excellent 'walk through' scenarios to learn the product; we recommend it highly. And the nice thing about a virtual system is, of course, if you make changes and break it, you can always roll back to a new saved image!

The book has been available for a week, and thanks to all the FAST and SharePoint administrators, develoreps, users, and business/content owners, it's doing much better that we could have hoped. Thanks to all of you who have purchased the book already!

As authors, we want to find out what you liked; what you found confusing; and what informaiton you need to do you job that we couldn;t include in the book (remember, FAST has more than 2000 pages in documentation; our limit was 500 pages.. which we missed by only 4 pages!)

So here's our offer to you: talk back to us! Following this link to a quick survey about you, and about what more you need to know about. It's 8 questions... come on, give us a minute now, and in a few weeks - the end of October - we'll draw the winning name from the list of those who complete the survey. The lucky winner will receive a free autographed copy of the book!

Thanks again for all your support, and please do let us know what more we can do for you!